Military judge tosses out two charges against decorated Navy SEAL who 'killed a 15-year-old ISIS terrorist, posed with his corpse for a photo and bragged about killing 200 others during his tour of duty'

It does sound like he went too far but what stresses was he under?  He was dealing with some pretty disgusting people

A military judge has dismissed two charges against a decorated veteran who is accused of murdering a 15-year-old Afghan terrorist with his knife.

Edward Gallagher is currently being held in a military prison in California amid accusations he repeatedly plunged a knife into the wounded body of a young ISIS fighter in 2017 and fired sniper rounds at innocent civilians in Iraq. 

On Tuesday, Navy Capt Aaron Rugh, the judge in the court martial, announced that Gallagher, 39, will no longer face trial for allegedly performing a reenlistment ceremony next to the militant's corpse or for operating a drone over the corpse, according to The San Diego Tribune.

However, Gallagher is still facing charges for premeditated murder for stabbing the teen and aggravated assault for firing rounds at civilians.  Gallagher is also facing an allegation he posed for a photo with the militant's body.

The chief petty officer's platoon commander, Lt Jacob Portier, is also facing court martial charges alleging that he was aware of the complaints against Gallagher, but failed to report them.  Portier has also been charged with conducting Gallagher's reenlistment ceremony.

Last week, seven Navy SEALs were granted immunity to testify against Gallagher. Up to 13 additional witnesses are expected to testify against the soldier whose trial begins on February 19.

During a motion hearing on January 25, prosecutors said witnesses told NCIS investigators that Gallagher bragged about killing up to 200 people – 'three a day' he allegedly said – during his 2017 deployment to Mosul, Iraq, according to the Tribune.

Prosecutors also revealed at the time that they had recovered a knife that tested positive for DNA, although they did not reveal whose DNA was found on the weapon - or say conclusively that it was related to the incident in question.

In November last year, prosecutors presented accounts from several other SEALs in Gallagher's platoon describing his behavior as reckless and bloodthirsty.

They said he fired into civilian crowds, gunned down a girl walking along a riverbank and an old man carrying a water jug, and threatened to kill fellow SEALs if they reported his actions.

In May last year, Iraqi forces in Mosul caught an Islamic State fighter aged in his teens, who was left battered and bloody from the combat.

Investigators allege while the teen was receiving medical treatment from SEAL medics, Gallagher walked up and stabbed him in his neck and side with a knife, killing the fighter.

Then, they said, he posed for photographs with the fighter's body, holding his head in one hand and his blade in the other – and sent one of the images to a fellow SEAL with the caption: 'I got him with my hunting knife'.

Gallagher is a married father-of-three and a highly lauded special warfare operator who has racked up numerous awards during his eight tours of duty.

After his latest tour, fighting Islamic State militants in Iraq, he was named the top platoon leader in SEAL Team 7 and nominated for the Silver Star, the military's third-highest honor.

He fought in Iraq and Afghanistan several times and has been a Navy Seal for 14 years.

In November, his brother, Sean, defended him in an interview with Fox News. 'This investigation is not about justice and the truth, it's about a win,' Sean told the network at the time. 'A SEAL is a shiny, golden nail where if you take them down it makes you look good,' he added.

The Navy has charged Gallagher with premeditated murder, attempted murder and nearly a dozen other offenses, including obstruction of justice and bringing 'discredit upon the armed forces'.

He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

SOURCE






Kate Hudson Raising Daughter ‘Genderless’: “We still don’t know what she’s going to identify as.”

Child abuse.  A girl should be raised as a girl.  It seems that the girl is pretty girlish anyway, fortunately

Last week, actress Kate Hudson revealed that she’s raising her daughter with a “genderless” approach, since she’s unsure what gender she’ll “identify” as in the future.

Asked if raising a baby girl will change her parenting approach from how she’s raising her two boys, Hudson told AOL.com, “It doesn’t really change my approach, but there’s definitely a difference. I think you just raise your kids individually regardless – like a genderless [approach].”

“We still don’t know what she’s going to identify as,” added the “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” star.

“I will say that, right now, she is incredibly feminine in her energy, her sounds and her way,” she continued. “It’s very different from the boys, and it’s really fun to actually want to buy kids’ clothes.”

“With the boys it was just like onesies … actually, I did pretty good with the boys,” Hudson said. “But with her it’s a whole other ball game. There’s some stuff that I’m like, ‘I can’t do that to her, because it’s so over-the-top.”

Hudson, 39, announced the arrival of her and her musician boyfriend ​Danny Fujikawa’s daughter in October. “She’s here,” Hudson posted on Instagram.

“We have decided to name our daughter Rani (pronounced Ronnie) after her grandfather, Ron Fujikawa,” explained the Fabletics founder. “Ron was the most special man who we all miss dearly. To name her after him is an honor.”

“Everyone is doing well and happy as can be,” she added. “Our family thanks you for all the love and blessings that have been sent our way and we send ours right back.”

In December of 2017, singer Pink gushed about taking a “gender neutral” approach to parenting her daughter Willow and son Jameson; Willow was 11 at the time of the interview and Jameson was 11 months old. The celebrity boasted to The Sunday People that she and her husband have a “very label-less household.”

“I was in a school and the bathroom outside the kindergarten said, ‘Gender Neutral – anybody,’ and it was a drawing of many different shapes,” Pink said. “I took a picture of it and I wrote, ‘Progress.’ I thought that was awesome. I love that kids are having this conversation.”  The “What About Us” singer said her daughter told her “she is going to marry an African woman.”

“I was like, ‘Great, can you teach me how to make African food?’ And she’s like, ‘Sure, Mama. And we are going to live with you while our house is getting ready,'” Pink added. “I was like, ‘What the f***, who are you?'” Pink added. “‘Who is paying for this by the way?'”

Actor Liev Schreiber turned heads during the summer of 2017, when his eight-year-old son was dressed as Harley Quinn for Comic-Con. The boy’s mother is actress Naomi Watts, Schreiber’s ex-wife. The young boy was dressed in ripped fishnet stockings, short shorts, makeup, and had red and purple hair extensions worn in pigtails.

SOURCE






Stacey Abrams’ Full Embrace of Identity Politics Is a Recipe for Disaster

As a fat black female she certainly has some choice of identities

Following the 2016 elections, liberal intellectuals like Mark Lilla and Francis Fukuyama counseled Democrats to stop embracing identity politics and instead appeal to Americans as Americans, not as divided groups.

The Democrats’ choice of Stacey Abrams to deliver the response to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address may be a sign that’s not in the cards.

Abrams ran for governor of Georgia last year and lost by more than 50,000 votes, but has yet to be gracious about her defeat. She is now using the enthusiasm her campaign generated among her far-left base to argue against the universalist Enlightenment ideas upon which this nation was founded.

Abrams says those ideals are false, or at best “devoid of context.” What we need is “revolt.”

Her recent essay on identity politics, published last Friday by Foreign Affairs, is a forthright defense of dividing America into groups based on identities that can be as varied as race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and even disability status. The only thing that matters is the ability to claim a trait that bestows victimhood status.

To people like Abrams who subscribe to this view, this status—and not intrinsic worth, hard work, or talent—is what entitles one to respect, government protection, and benefits.

This is a Marxist worldview that divides humanity into monolithic dominant or subjugated groups where any interaction between them is viewed only in terms of power relations.

Not everything that Abrams wrote in her essay is wrong. She is right to note that organized labor for a long time discriminated against African-Americans, and this “contributed to the rise of a segregated middle class and to persistent pay disparities.”

But much of the rest of her essay, written in a response to one by Fukuyama in the same publication, relies on selective or just plain wrong views of history.

She is wrong, for example, when she writes that “the marginalized did not create identity politics: their identities have been forced on them by dominant groups, and politics is the most effective method of revolt.”

Blacks in America have a long history of victimization and exclusion. But analogizing their unique experience to that of other people and creating a long list of different castes with grievances is a complete non-sequitur. Yet it is a project to which activists have devoted a lot of time and effort, as an examination of the record shows.

A 1970 study from UCLA, funded by the Ford Foundation, showed that even at the dawn of the ‘70s, rank-and-file Mexican-Americans neither saw themselves as a marginalized group nor even as a minority at all. “Indeed, merely calling Mexican-Americans a ‘minority’ and implying that the population is the victim of prejudice and discrimination has caused irritation among many who prefer to believe themselves indistinguishable white Americans,” the authors concluded.

The testimony of the time is riddled with evidence that identity politics was far from a grassroots movement, as Abrams and others always proclaim. As the historian David G. Gutierrez wrote, “Even if many Mexican-Americans refused to accept a Chicano self-identity, much less the ethnic separatism espoused by the militants, the actions of the Chicano activists undoubtedly convinced at least some government officials that the militants’ grievances warranted attention.”

Even earlier, the sociologist George I. Sanchez had written to Julian Samora (one of the activists who sought group making, and later went on to found La Raza), “For gosh sakes, don’t characterize the Spanish-American with what is obviously true of the human race, and then imply, by commission or omission, that his characteristics are peculiarly his and, OF COURSE, radically different from those of the ‘Anglos.’”

The poor, Sanchez wrote to Samora, all shared the same societal dysfunctions, no matter their race and ethnicity. “The characteristics that distinguish the Spanish-speaking group in any part of the United States are much less ethnic than they are socio-economic … . [T]here is no real ethnic sameness among the various subdivisions of the same Spanish-speaking group.” It takes “a veritable shotgun wedding to make Puerto Ricans, Spanish-Mexicans, and Filipinos appear to be culturally homogenous.”

But in her essay, Abrams rejects socio-economic arguments as a “class trap” and doubles down on what she thinks is the real narrative: identity politics.

And of course, there’s the part about politics being a means to revolt. The Declaration of Independence takes an entirely different view when it states that “governments are instituted among men” to secure the rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But of course, these are natural rights that are part of the inheritance of the Enlightenment, and Abrams makes very clear that she thinks its universalist claims are a bunch of hooey.

She attributes the success of her coalition (again, she lost, despite the support of the entire cultural establishment; even Oprah Winfrey campaigned for her) to “articulating an understanding of each group’s unique concerns instead of trying to create a false image of universality.”

She returns to this theme when she warns against “a retrenchment to amorphous, universal descriptors devoid of context or nuance.”

It is here that Abrams demonstrates the danger of identity politics. She is rejecting the ideals of the Enlightenment and even the Renaissance, and returning us back to the estates and classes of the Middle Ages. This threatens fundamental concepts such as the right to conscience, property, speech, and due process, never mind the bedrock ideal that “all men are created equal.”

It simply isn’t true, as Abrams writes, that identity-politics activism “will strengthen democratic rule, not threaten it.” It is equally contradictory that embracing “the identities of groups in a democracy enhances the complexity and capacity of the whole.”

Thinking of individuals as members of sub-collectives can never strengthen democracy, at least not democracy as we understand it, just as minimizing or even erasing commonalities is destructive of common purpose.

Abrams has a momentary lapse into lucidity when she points out that “the current demographic and social evolution toward diversity in the United States has played out alongside a trend toward greater economic and social inequality.”

Right. That’s why identity politics isn’t working. It is predicated on inequalities, so it has to perpetuate them.

But, alas, that’s not her takeaway. Instead, she says the entry of marginalized groups into public life has “spawned reactionary limits on their legal standing.”

Pray tell, what are those limits? Is this philosophy what one of our two major parties is going to be pushing going forward?

SOURCE






Margaret Thatcher statue approved in hometown of Grantham despite threat of 'far-Left' vandalism

A statue of Margaret Thatcher has been approved in her hometown after the local council ignored a vandalism threat posed by the "motivated far-Left movement".

Councillors in Grantham, Lincs, on Tuesday voted unanimously to approve plans for the £300,000 bronze statue of Britain’s first female prime minister to be erected in the centre of town.

Lincolnshire Police recommended the statue - which has been privately funded by Douglas Jennings, a leading UK sculptor - be placed on a "sufficiently high plinth" to deter attackers.

The work, which is currently said to be in storage at "a secret location", will be unveiled in the centre of Grantham at St Peter's Hill and will be over 6.4 metres tall.

Despite several suggestions by successive mayors, Grantham's only tribute to Baroness Thatcher until now has been a tiny plaque above her father's former grocer's store.

The local council adopted the statue after plans to build it on Parliament Square were rejected by Westminster Council due to the fear of it being targeted by protesters.

A Westminster council planning document suggested the proposed statue had come too soon after Baroness Thatcher's death in 2013. The council has a "10 year principle", where statues or memorials are generally not erected until 10 years have elapsed since the subject's death.

The Metropolitan Police also raised concerns over possible civil disobedience, but this did not form part of the planning application.

The deadlock over Baroness Thatcher’s statue was finally broken last week when a report to South Kesteven District Council stated there is not felt to be a significant threat to the installation of the statue locally.

However, it added: “In general there remains a motivated far-Left movement across the UK who may be committed to public activism.

“It still remains that there is a possibility any public statue of ‘Baroness Thatcher’ would be a likely target for politically motivated vandals.”

The application, by Grantham Community Heritage Association (GCHA), which runs the Grantham Museum, had received 17 letters of objection to the proposals, mainly noting Mrs Thatcher’s position as a “divisive figure” and the potential for crime and disorder.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************